I have had a stunning new realization. It’s simply this: That when I’m in New York, Albania is imaginary. And when, tomorrow, I get on those airplanes, New York will fade and become strange — just a story I tell. And for these interim days, I’m neither here nor there — existing somewhere in between. And no one spends time here with me — so I have to accept an imaginary existence.

Now to go home, with everything scintillating around me — nothing quite real, or false, either. Just possibility. The dogs are real, god bless them. Pray god one remembers to pack the right things.

Thursday night – next Monday I’ll be getting on a plane to fly back to Albania . . . . Why is it that anything one is passionate about so quickly becomes an esoteric exercise? I’ve been back in New York for two months now. For the first month, it was easy enough to live off memories of Albania – the smell of woodsmoke (oddly like bacon) was still in so many of my clothes! I could close my eyes and summon up dozen upon dozens of visceral memories. Just how Sose’s eyes sparkle, when she’s telling you something particularly funny that you can’t possibly understand, since she’s speaking Albanian, except, you do understand. How she thumps you on the back and says “Bukur!” (lovely) and “Good-good!” Just what it feels like to be able to look up, always, and see the mountains around you. What the water tastes like, scooped by handful from the stream pouring down the mountainside . . . . the particularly, peculiarly humorous faces of the pink-and-green grasshoppers that like, so oddly, to peer at you . . . . Basically, whenever New York wasn’t actively engaging me, I had an Albania-of-the-Mind to retreat to. And did.

A month later, it shifted. The second month of my exile was spent making up stories of things that might happen, if I were there. What the mountains will look like in autumn, how I might stomp about in my boots, where we will sleep when the cathedral-ish open wood-tiled ceiling of the of house makes it too cold to inhabit . . . . I’ve made up whole rooms that ought to exist, complete with fireplaces, bookshelves . . . and this in its own way is good, too. Another way of being in Albania. Because in my heart or mind, or whatever is most important, I AM in Albania.

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My name is Catherine Bohne, and at least initially, I will be your author for this website.  I am an American woman who owns a bookstore and lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, New York (the world).   Last January, emerging from eight exhausting years of running a struggling independent bookstore full-tilt and non-stop, I suddenly woke up, shook myself off, and realized I could begin travelling again.  I drank a bottle of red wine, called up Continental, cashed in a pile of airmiles and got myself a ticket to Albania.

Back when I was 11 years old, I was on a boat with my mother and father, traveling somewhat higgilty-piggilty from Italy to Greece. The boat slid past the wildest, greenest, most silent and mysterious landscape I’ve ever seen. I wanted to get off the boat. I wanted to swim to shore and lose myself in that place, almost, I think, more than I’ve ever wanted anything. I was 11. I said “Dad – what’s THAT?” “That?” answered my father, “That’s Albania, Catherine. No one can go there.” I’ll go, I thought. Nearly thirty years went by, and then I remembered, and so — I went.

My mother is Italian/Croatian and my father was from  the sunny land of Brooklyn.  I spent summers in Croatia when I was a child, and lived three of my teenage years in Swaziland (Africa).  My last major chosen expeditional vacation was (ten years ago – running a bookstore takes so much time!) to Kurdistan (selected chiefly because the state department said I absolutely shouldn’t go there – I had a marvelous time).  I have almost always felt more at home in the world, than at that home in the home where I’m supposed to belong.

Like all smart children, I have always wanted to run away from home.  Is this why my reason for traveling always seems to be to get away to somewhere?  I mean get away but also to GET to somewhere.  Be somewhere else.  Perhaps be someone else.  Live in a different world, but I mean live, not just visit.  I don’t want to go: where there are lots of tourists, to generic resorts that could be anywhere, to places that make me feel like I’m in a frozen, pre-prepared, pre-packaged museum (though those can be amusing), or to places which have been somehow warped by the traffic of tourists.  I do want to go:  to places which are really real, to places of that particular joyful solemnity that accompanies true beauty, to places where I can wander and get lost, to places where I will learn something, to places which are quiet and to places where I can know and be known.  I’m not very good at doing nothing, so I like joining in and lending a hand, being useful.  My idea of “doing nothing” is writing and drawing and having adventures, so I also like places where I am free to wander around and where people will allow me to prove myself, and just laugh if I seem a bit eccentric.

Greetings! Përshëndetje!

Welcome to the online home of Hotel Rilindja and your source of information about travel to the Valbona Valley of the Albanian Highlands or Malësi, the heart of Albania’s wild “Accursed Mountains.”

Pleased to meet you! Gëzohem që u njohëm!

When you visit the Malësi, in addition to being warmly and enthusiastically welcomed by the local people, you experience perhaps the last stronghold of an old-world hospitality, in which the host is not only inclined to welcome you, but is in fact honor-bound protect the well-being of their visitors. Come see us for a uniquely unspoiled experience of nature, for incredible hiking, for the delicious traditional food, for one of the oldest and best-preserved cultures in Europe, for the splendor of the scenery, and for the slow-paced pleasure of a way of life that you may have thought didn’t exist anymore.

We look forward to helping you become one of the first to rediscover the most beautiful, mysterious and unexplored place in Europe!